Struggling in a wilderness

Who is the Plankton? She is a woman pushing 50 who decided to divorce her husband a few years ago. She has written a blog detailing her unhappiness in being unable to find another man.

The Daily Mail has an article about her, but her blog itself is even more interesting.

The first thing to note is that she really does want to be with a man. She isn't pretending otherwise:

Show me a (straight) woman of my age who is alone and who says she doesn’t want a man.

Show me a liar.

She isn't coping well at all with her life as it is:

As a divorced woman the wrong side of 45 with a brace of kids, I am a plankton on the food chain of sexuality and the prospect of a relationship.

Women die long before they actually die ...  I may live till I am ninety, but a sort of death has already come. I am already in a wilderness ... A woman’s trajectory; a barrel of laughs.

So why hasn't she found someone? She believes, rightly or wrongly, that the most eligible men are chasing after younger women:

A man can pick from a wider pool of women: his age and under, by several decades.  I have a friend who is late thirties and lives with and has children by a man in his mid sixties.  She is one of the youngest girlfriends he has had but by no means the only one of her age.  He is paunchy and has grey chest hair and is not especially rich ... They argue a lot and she is not particularly happy yet is counting herself lucky.  He plucked her out of a richesse of willing women.  All circling him like vultures, they were, before my friend “got” him.

That might be exaggerated, but you can see where she is coming from. When she married she was young enough to still have the experience of sexual power that younger women have. After her divorce, she was suddenly thrust into a different world, one in which it was the men of her age who had the better options. It seems as if she is finding it difficult to adjust to the change.

So is it all doom and gloom for women? It doesn't have to be. The traditional idea was that women would encourage the qualities in men that would make them good husbands (the family man ideal) and would give up some of the sexual power they wielded in their 20s (by committing to one man rather than pursuing casual relationships with many) and in return men would give up some of the sexual power they wielded later in life (by remaining loyal to their wives).

The "Plankton" unfortunately seems to have pursued the more modern understanding of relationships. In her 20s, at that critical time for women, she went for (you guessed it) the bad boys. In discussing what she is now looking for in a man she writes:

Kind is obvious, and absolutely the opposite of what I sought when I was young, to my cost. Then, good-looking and cool was more important.  Now, cool is what I actively do not want. I did cool men in my twenties and cool was invariably synonymous with cruel.

This is really a way of saying that she was selecting men on the basis of sexual attraction alone, rather than considering as well what kind of husband a man might make. Her orientation to sexual attraction alone is reflected too in her promiscuity at this time:

Of course, my young self consoled myself with the thought that quantity not quality validated me as an attractive sexual being, though my older self knows better – or at least thinks she does. Quantity, then, was important. Now, not so much.

Quantity, she admits, was important. Particularly with cool/cruel men.

It's not a very good way for women to secure a long-term future with a man in marriage. It distorts the culture of relationships between men and women - puts it on the wrong foundation.

The message of all this, I think, is that there are women too who have much to lose from the sexual revolution. Is the "liberation" of pursuing cruel/bad boys in your 20s really worth decades of unhappiness later on? According to the "Plankton" she was not even made happy in her 20s by her promiscuity:

It didn’t make me happy then, in my twenties ...  for the most part these notches constituted no more than notches or, at best, meaningless and at worst, malign names on a green bit of paper.

Better for women to be oriented to the creation of happy and stable marriages - and for this to inform what women select for when they are at the peak of "the food chain of sexuality".